Mar 7, 2015 | announcement

Issue 21 — From the Editor

by Brian J. White

And here we are, already at the halfway point of Year 3! Fireside has a lot going on. We’ve got Andrea Phillips’ novel Revisioncoming out on May 5. And we’re opening to flash fiction submissions on March 15 to fill out the rest of the Year 3 issues.

It’s also time to start thinking about Year 4 and beyond. Year 3 is fully paid for, but our plan for this year has always been to try to make our funding more sustainable than coming to Kickstarter once a year. There may be six issues left in Year 3, but we have to start thinking about Year 4 now, so we can keep buying stories and making plans. Fireside costs about $1,500 a month to produce, almost all of which pays for stories and art. We’ve got a few ways you can help, including joining us on Patreon, where we’re currently taking in about $135 a month and giving out rewards like digital wallpapers, postcards, and prints of Galen Dara’s monthly art. You can also set up a recurring monthly pledge (or a one-time pledge) via Paypal or Amazon on our Support Us page.

Thanks, as always, for your support.

On to Issue 21!

Our short story this month is Zanders the Magnificent by Annie Neugebauer, a dark look behind the curtain as a master illusionist is crafted by a mother with a singular focus. In flash fiction, we have Aidan Doyle’s Pride and Profanity, which takes us into a twisted, whimsical world of words, and Rebecca Birch’s A Taste of Cinnamon where we follow two young teens as they explore the boundaries of their starship, and of each other. And we have Chapter Six of Lilith Saintcrow’s She Wolf and Cub, Abby is hunting for Geoff, in typical Abby fashion. She’s going to start a fight…

© 2015 Brian J. White

About the author

Brian started Fireside Fiction Company in 2012 as an experiment in crowdfunding and paying speculative fiction writers well above the accepted professional rate at the time. It worked! Thanks, have a great day!

Brian has been informed he has to write more in his bio. Fine! Brian took that experiment through five Kickstarters (and did not die!) and into a subscription model. During his tenure, Fireside published 150 stories, five novels, and one novella, and also published the first #BlackSpecFic report, which examined the massive under-representation of Black short-story writers in the field, prompting conversation, reflection, and change in the speculative fiction community. It remains one of the most important things he has worked on in his adult life. Brian was a 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Non-Professional category for Fireside, and Fireside has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards.

Facing the burnout that is all too common among people who work at small presses, Brian stepped down as editor and publisher in 2017 to regroup and recharge mentally. He returned as interim editorial director in 2020 and resumed full ownership of the company in June 2021 with a great team you can read about below.

In the wider world, Brian is a former journalist who worked as an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville from 2006–2010 and at the Boston Globe from 2010–2018, where he was part of the staff that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2014 for the newspaper’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2014. He still lives around Boston, where he works as an editor for a private company and takes photographs, paints miniatures, and spends time with his amazing wife and various cats.